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What do you make of this section that claims recent research has identified an upper bound on the genetic component? > …prediction accuracy depends on sample s
by theptip 2y ago
What do you make of this section that claims recent research has identified an upper bound on the genetic component?
> …prediction accuracy depends on sample size, could the findings drastically change with more samples in the future? In fact, through the magic of statistics, we actually know that this claim will always to be true. We know this because we have estimated a parameter called molecular heritability, which tells us the upper bound on what a genetic predictor could ever achieve. Molecular heritability comes in two forms. “Population heritability” is a non-causal measure of the overall correlation between all genotyped variants and the trait, and it is estimated in large populations of unrelated individuals. Population heritability includes direct genetic influences on the trait that we typically think of as “genetics” but it also includes a lot of other correlated stuff that we typically think of as confounding, like cultural influences on the trait from relatives or prior generations (including the effects of parenting or dynastic advantages) or biases due to population stratification. In contrast, “direct heritability” is a measure of the specific genetic influences that are acting within individuals, and it is estimated in a large number of families. Direct heritability is immune to many sources of environmental confounding and, with some assumptions, can be interpreted as an estimate of causal genetic effects (for theory and derivations see [Veller et al. (2023)])